Smart To-Do App Wants to Be Your Personal Assistant

To-do lists are the kind of thing that learner-programmers are asked to build. It is a good task, not too hard but not a trivial problem, and you have something quite useful at the end of it all.

But they are static, they don’t learn from what you do and while they can look good, they don’t offer a huge amount of added value over and above the back of an envelope or a sticky note.

24me, a Tel Aviv-based company, is part of a trend in new technologies that go some of the way toward acting like a digital personal assistant: not merely logging your tasks, but helping you complete them and even anticipating your needs. Expect to see more of these kind of location-aware, time-aware, artificial-intelligence-driven apps.

Google Inc.'sGoogle Now is an example of a service that learns your behavior and then makes suggestions based on previous actions. For example, in the morning, Google Now will display the traffic for your commute to work once it has learned enough about you.

According to co-founder Liat Mordechay, 24me pulls in data from your calendar and from task managers, then looks at previous behavior and uses an AI engine to make predictions.

“The main difference is we are talking about prediction,” Ms. Mordechay said. “Say you have a meeting tomorrow—what time? When do you need to leave for the meeting? Are there going to be any traffic issues? Leave a few minutes earlier.”

Some of the examples seem to offer little added benefit—it will use your Facebook data to pull in friends’ birthdays and remind you of them—but it is early days for this kind of tech. Ms. Mordechay said the more you use the app, the more it learns. “As you go along, the app will learn your life and, ultimately, will be able to automatically handle most of your daily activities.”

For U.S. and Canadian users, it can also integrate into your bank so that you can pay bills from within the app. According to Ms. Mordechay, the company is looking at providing the service outside of North America when other countries’ banking systems allow it.

The six-strong company, run by husband-and-wife team Ms. Mordechay and Chief Executive Gilad Hertanu, was founded in the start of 2012. It has completed one angel round of an undisclosed amount. The company launched version 1.0 of the app at the end of the year. It was politely received.

The new version includes a smart calendar that integrates with different calendars including Google, Outlook Exchange and Yahoo. It gives a single view of both meetings and tasks. Tasks with due date and time will be shown on the daily calendar.

Given the data that the company is storing, Mr. Hertanu said everything is encrypted and is stored using enhanced security on Amazon Web Services. The company does not store banking information. At the moment, data aren’t aggregated, said Mr. Hertanu, but if users wanted services that allowed them to compare utility costs, for example, then that would require using other data. It would be on an opt-in basis.

Since the app has only just gone live, it is too early to say how good it is. We will try it out and get back with a fuller review later. The app is only available for iOS, although Ms. Mordechay said an Android version would be coming later this year or early next year.

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